Ancient Art of India: Masterworks of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

(Los Angeles, October 17, 2011)—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) collection of Indian art will travel for the first ever exhibition of ancient Indian art in Mexico. The special exhibition, Ancient Art of India: Masterworks of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will be presented at the Museo Nacional de las Culturas in Mexico City. The show features 115 objects from LACMA’s permanent collection—one of the most comprehensive groupings of South Asian art in the Western hemisphere—and explores the elaborate cosmologies of ancient India’s three main indigenous religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

 Ancient India’s religious mythology and associated artistic imagery were among the most highly developed of all world cultures. Each of these religions constructed systems of the universe with multiple realms, which were populated by a diverse range of real and imaginary inhabitants.  Divinities, demigods, demons, mortals, and animals all interacted in a grand theater of life, the afterlife, and the endless cycle of time and rebirth. Numerous traumatic conflicts and heroic exploits were imagined in prose and poem and portrayed in a sophisticated tradition of sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts.

Image credits:

Unknown, Battling Elephants, circa 1700, Gift of Jane Greenough Green in honor of the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

India, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh, A Dwarf Drummer, circa 500, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase, Photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

India, Uttar Pradesh, Buddha Shakyamuni, late 6th century, Gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation, Photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

India, Rajasthan, Kota region, Atru (?), Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon, circa 850-900, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase, Photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

EXHIBITION: Ancient Art of India: Masterworks of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ON VIEW: October 19, 2011–January 29, 2012 LOCATION: MUSEO NACIONAL DE LAS CULTURAS, MEXICO